Never a dull moment

As responsible parents, with the load of information available on what is good for health and what is not, we tend to provide wholesome food and beverages to our children. This results in good habits in children but also creates piquant situation at times. Both our daughters do not drink coffee and tea as we have always fed them hot milk in the morning and evening. The younger one , once in a way ,drinks small quantities of tea but the elder one has never tried out both coffee and tea. Both are in school and the elder one will go to college in 2012-2013 academic session. The elder one has a serious issue now. She says that when she goes with her friends to places like Cafe Coffee Day or Barista while in college, what would she drink ? This reminds me of what she used to do as a kid. We had ingrained in her that she had to drink milk at 4 pm in the evening without fail. She went on a two day trip with her uncle and family. They had gone by road from Delhi to a hill station which was a s...

Economists have not been able to predict the economic whammy which hit the South eastern Tiger economies in 1998. Reviews by World Bank and leading private analysts painted a very rosy picture a week before these economies tanked. The currencies of Thailand, Indonesia , south Korea and Indonesia dived to half their values overnight. How could this have happened with all the tools and prescience economics and analysts are supposed to have ? A similar thing happened again in USA and developed world in 2008. The housing sub prime crisis exploded. Now everybody says that this was waiting to happen but nobody cautioned for preventive action until the bubble burst. A few economists warned of the impending disaster waiting to happen due to poor quality housing loans being given to all and sundry with little or no income. But they were very few and theirs was a cry in wilderness. The vast majority were going gaga over the blooming economy brought on by the housing boom. When the borrowers defa...

I am not a great fan of Hindi movies. Since we have chosen to settle down in Delhi and kids are keen on Hindi movies, I have been a few movies with them in the last three years. I had been with them for the first show on the day of release of "tare Zameen Par". Recently, I had a colleague of mine visiting for a meeting and the meeting was postponed for a day. For want of anything better to do, we roamed around for some time and decided to visit a theatre which is a landmark in grandeur. But the film on show was "Dabangg". My colleague, an ex IAS officer nearing golden age was keen to see the theatre and we went to watch the movie. Salman Khan had us in splits of laughter from the word go. It was a hilarious movie where Salman Khan's deliberate non acting acting stood out. He has been cast in Rajnikanth mould and I should say Salman outshone Rajni style in "Dabangg". Every action of Salman is exaggerated. When his mother dies, he cries as though half th...

There was an interesting ( and depressing at the same time ) news yesterday, Our Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is going to meet industry leaders and promoters to persuade them to lead less ostentatious and sedate lifestyles. Such a request would fly against the desire of captains of industry to pit themselves against business captains abroad , especially those in USA and Europe , who lead a lavish lifestyle.What use is an open unbridled economy ( where government does not interfere and step in only to write off all loans and extend sops when things become dicey as during economic slow down ) unless the fruits of labour can not enjoyed and displayed by the business leaders and captains of the industry ? This is not the interesting aspect of this news item. Finance Minister has stated that with 37.2 % of Indian population living below poverty line, the captains of the industry have to be sensitive to the masses and the travails of our nation. The poverty line debate has been a slippe...

The world Cup fever is over. A new name is embellished on the cup- that of Spain, the perennial under achiever. Spain has some of the best clubs- Real Madrid and Barcelona count among the best clubs in the world with an array of international stars in their ranks. Most of the South American stars tend to play in Spain and some in Italy - could be due to skill in Spanish language. With such a rich tradition in football, it is surprising that Spain has taken such a long time to win the World Cup. This is the first time Spain entered the semi finals in World Cup and it has gone all the way to win the coveted trophy. Spain played the game in a fluid and non confrontationist style. The first yellow card on a Spanish player was in the quarter final match against Paraguay. The semifinals against Germany was a blemishless game with no yellow cards against either team. The final was a scrappy affair with The Netherlands playing a rough game earning eight yellow cards and a red cards. Spain m...

Internet is a wonder tool which has revolutionised the landscape on sharing information storage, transfer and communication in the last decade and a half. A lot of other things have changed as well and some of them for good- like payment of telephone bills, electricity bills, booking of air and train tickets and bank transactions which can be done at a touch of a button. Standing in a queue for long after travelling from one's place of work or residence was a energy sapping and time consuming exercise especially if one is trying to book tickets for holiday season or during holiday season. Everybody who matter has an email address and this has resulted in the near death of snail mail amongst contacts in major cities and big towns who have everyday access to internet. It has been long time since people have written letters as it is internet, mobile verbal telephony or sms is the medium of communication these days. Internet revolution has made English the prime language around the wor...

World Cup Football championship is going on in South Africa. Football is the most popular game in the world and has the highest viewership and along with Olympics is the sport with the highest viewership in the world. Football is a simple game in terms of rules of the game and has following all over the world unlike other games like basketball, volley ball and cricket which are of interest to some cluster of countries or the other. Liek Olympics, the build up for World Cup football event in South Africa commenced a month before the event in Indian newspapers. There were write ups about each of the 32 teams participating and there were several articles about how South African administrators were working hard to make it a perfect event. The first set of 48 league matches are over and 16 teams are now battling it out in the knock out stage. From this stage each match has to produce a result and the winning teams advance to quarter finals followed by semi final and final.At each stage the ...